


Cut to My Heart

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Series: Goretober Prompts [14]
Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mental Institutions, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 10:32:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12479560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: Mental Institution AU. WARNING: frank discussion of mental health issues, depression, suicide, self harming behavior, violent behavior. An extra problematic representation of mental health and mental health services. Basically, all trigger warnings apply. Goretober Prompt: lacerations.





	Cut to My Heart

When Dean was fourteen he stabbed his mother’s boyfriend in the stomach six times with a box cutter. The man lived and there was some evidence that he’d been abusive, which was why Dean didn’t go to jail, not even kiddie jail. Instead he went to the state hospital for testing and treatment. He was still there six years later although he had run away twice, the first time for thirteen months, and had been transferred to the upper adult ward on his eighteenth birthday. This had all been arranged by his court appointed public defender. Dean didn’t know how much he trusted a British guy to be good at American law, but William came to visit him periodically, years after he was the man’s responsibility, so Dean figured he was probably a good guy underneath.

Dean never earned lower ward privileges and he wasn’t interested in it enough for the staff to use the possibility to entice him to good behavior. He liked to read and to run on the treadmill and periodically grew fond of some random fellow patient, providing him with support and patience until they invariably got better and left. He rarely took these partings well, adding a lot of stress and tension to the ward as a whole. In fact, the staff found him, oh not dislikable, but thoroughly exhausting. They often drew straws to assign someone the one on one supervision that was required to take Dean off ward, to the dentist say or, the time he broke his hand punching a mirror, to x-ray and surgery. His mother had only come to visit him a handful of times in all those years, but considering the things that always seemed to happen after one of her appearances everyone considered that a blessing.

The first time Roman tried to kill himself nobody found out about it. He just woke up the next day at noon with his head pounding and a puddle of puke drying onto the carpet next to his bed. He was too tired to try again. He was too tired to even clean the vomit off the rug. He just rolled it up and then threw it away. He stayed tired for another eight months. He was tired when he got up in the morning and tired when he went to work and tired all day while he filled out membership forms and taught housewives how to use the elliptical machines. He was so tired when he got home he usually went immediately to bed and fell asleep with the television on. He slept all day any time he got a day off and only occasionally talked to people outside of work. The only reason his apartment wasn’t a health code violation was because he didn’t ever remember to eat at home so there weren’t any dirty dishes and the gym did most of his laundry for him, washing his uniforms and providing towels for showers. He was stable in the sense that a rock is stable because it is too heavy to move. In the sense that a car wheel in a snow drift is stable because it is just stuck enough that its ceaseless spinning has no effect on its momentum. Then his doctor increased his SSRI by twenty milligrams and two weeks later he slit his wrists in the shower room. 

He shouldn’t have been in the upper wards except that he got into fights with the orderlies, especially the big guys. Something about really big guys seemed to put Roman edge, made him aggressive and territorial. He was pretty big himself, wide in the shoulders and well defined in his arms from work. The staff tried to accommodate him, but there was only so much they could do. One day Braun and Brock tried to hurry him into art therapy and he shoved and hit and flattened them both, breaking Brock’s nose and opening up the skin over Braun’s eyebrow. He didn’t stop when the men started to bleed and was shot up with haldol, a detail that they failed to mention when they rolled him into the upper ward and tossed him onto an open bed.

Seth absolutely didn’t belong in the upper ward. Seth never wanted to hurt anybody. He didn’t even really want to hurt himself. It was just that he went numb sometimes and the gnawing, swooning dizziness of that was only swayed by doing something drastic, like climbing on top of the Earth Sciences building or sleeping with someone wildly inappropriate, or cutting designs that bled and scarred into the skin of his own thighs. It was that last habit that got him admitted. He had actually been trying to get help, going from student health center to counselors and groups in a kind of daze. He hadn’t mentioned the cuts, not because he considered it a big deal but because it was embarrassing, not the sort of thing grown men were supposed to do even if they were struggling. When his therapist saw the blood coming through his jeans one day and the story came out all in a jumble that Seth swore sounded worse than it was, she drove him to the hospital herself.

Seth was in the lower wards for a while and he seemed to be doing better. He was happy and agreeable and became close with Dr. Helmsley. Very close, actually. The two had a lot of private, off the books conversations and Seth often addressed the doctor by his first name, not a familiarity that most of his patients were allotted. And then, well, nobody was sure what exactly happened but suddenly Seth went quiet and withdrawn and Dr. Helmsley came out of one of their sessions with a fat lip. Even that didn’t seem quite severe enough for the move and the staff tried to look into it. A lot of people asked Seth about it but all Seth would say, granted unprompted, was that Hunter, that is, Dr. Helmsley never did anything inappropriate or unprofessional. So Seth went upstairs and stayed there. 

Once they were all in the same place, it only took half a day for the three of them to meet.


End file.
